scottiebarnes

Right, well I haven't seen that program, but here's some realtime lightning network statistics:

https://1ml.com/statistics

Currently ~17k nodes, 82k channels, ~5k BTC capacity ($100m) on the network.

The network's capacity is up about 66% is the last year: https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity

> But yes lightning also doesn't work in El Salvador.

Do you have any citations?

I'm running a lightning node on testnet...have had some small issues finding a pathway in the graph to one of my nodes, but then again I'm new to it.

> In practice people have problems even understanding bitcoins (general speaking and El Salvador specific) and now lightning is the solution while people not even get Bitcoin.

Most people don't understand how tcp/ip or dns work, yet they have no problem using applications based on it on a daily basis.

> If you'd scale BTC to the amount of tx operated by VISA/MC, you'd need around 50% of the world electricity

Well, it doesn't make sense to scale the main chain in that sort of way, because you'd be looking at blocks the size of several terabytes in order to fit in global scale transactions. And so running a node would then require you to basically run a data center, which wouldn't make the system decentralized at all.

Electricity for mining is also not directly related to transaction throughput. Mining is the arbitrage of bitcoin price and electricity/mining hardware cost. The system technically does not need more electricity to secure the same amount of transactions. What happens is when bitcoin's price goes up, so does that arbitrage value, giving mining a profit incentive.

> ie. about between 300 and a million times more energy than VISA/Mastercard when adjusted to the number of transactions. [0]

This isn't really an apple to apples comparison. Since Bitcoin is a programmable platform, its possible to scale upwards exponentially with layer 2's (Lightning network), which allows for even more tps. Since transactions wouldn't need to run on the main chain (other than opening and closing channels), the upper bound is much higher.

https://d-central.tech/bitcoins-lightning-network-from-seven...

Fractional reserve banking allows a bank to take deposits and create loans up to some ratio, thus increasing money supply in the economy.

Wow, people made enough from covid assistance to retire forever?

> This man risked a life sentence in federal prison driving around with a ziploc bag full of those things.

How do you get the parts to the buyback program if you can't drive to them?

> The market is clearly not natural.

OP probably meant "more free-market / laissez faire" vs "less free-market / centrally planned".

> No net money is created.

Interesting that you're separating the responsibility of money creation to "banks within the banking system", and not the Fed, despite the Fed being the only power here who can buy unlimited assets.

The "money printing" phrase and meme is usually not referring to the literal physical printing of money, it is just a broad stroke meant to encompass the folly of central banks being able to buy unlimited assets with money they don't actually have.

The impact of QE is an increase in money supply.

Invest in solar panels with money from where?

That's the cool thing about open source software. You can literally design your own fork, and then work to persuade people that your vision is better.

You'll be called a shit coin. But over a long enough time horizon, someone will be right.

> but that means speculative use is strongly discouraged

Volatility is ironically a "feature". As it stands your system has no incentive for anyone to overcome the barriers of joining. You're proposing a better system from the outside, not the inside.

Attacking Bitcoin is fun and easy.

Taxing dirty electricity sources however seems to be regarded as a stupid idea.

So you need to do a background check on anyone you sell to, so you don't give money to sanctioned entities?

Are you on the hook for when you sell your couch on craigslist for dollars? If not, why not?

Seems impractical to expect end users to monitor the history of where money sent to them comes from. Would expect enforcement to be at the currency exchange point.

What does this have to do with big tech or wall street?

Seems more like the feds see new technology that poses a threat to their legacy systems, and that they need to innovate or risk losing their monopoly power over money.

You mean someone on your LAN exposing messages to the twitter/internet?

Even if the candidate is provided by the government?

I imagine a lot of the benefit of a CBDC goes to maintaining the USD's dominance internationally.

Domestically there is enough convenience.

But if you want to send USD to China, or somewhere with strict capital controls? Digital wallets that the user can self custody would be quite useful in bypassing those state authorities. Ironically, it may undermine your own state's authority...BUT at least you'd still ultimately control the network.

One relevant question is which system allows for the pooling of resources easier. In PoW you have mining pools, and a member changing pools is trivial as changing an address. In PoS you have large organizations like Coinbase running staking for users. Don't know how withdrawls will work, but that could be a very significant amount of eth. Coinbase would have to vote a certain way to comply with laws.

51% attacks aren't just a single actor dictating blocks, but the threat of a cartel of large stakeholders cooperating to attain 51% of vote power

It's just marketing buzzwords to attract attention to the tweet.

> Now this is not third party services. It’s bank account to bank account. As a result things like PayPal or Cash app make no sense in this part of the world and have no uptake here.

Aren't WeChat Pay and AliPay basically embedded versions of paypal/cash app?

> Money is an asset whose primary property is to be highly liquid. Liquidity is the ability to trade one asset for another.

And what gives an asset ultimate liquidity? Liquidity is desire to be owned by someone else. Something needs to make it desirable, what could that be?

Otherwise we'd be using feathers as money.

> Both are inflation protected.

Not sure about your logic here. The more exposure you have to an inflating/hyperfinflating currency, the more risk you carry. Your house holds value, but the rent in fiat you collect doesn't. Every month you collect X liras, but they become worth less and less. You're assuming you can reprice rent on demand, but contractually this is dependent on the locale.

> In a stable environment, using currency as store of value for anything more than 3 months is stupid

You only seem to be thinking in the single dimension of currency for the average person. You forget that all government treasury bonds (pretty big and important financial instrument in any economy) are denominated in some fiat currency. 10, 20, 30 year bonds. There are macro affects when people no longer expect or trust a currency to hold value. It is part of how debt crises occur.

> If you really really really want a currency that acts as a store of value, of course there is the King Dollar, the greatest currency in the history of currencies.

People think Bitcoin is a monetary experiment. But it really is the modern day fiat currencies that is the huge experiment.

> If you want store of value buy cash/dividend producing assets.

Cash/dividends denominated in falling currency is not a store of value. Ie. a profitable business that takes revenue in and pays out dividends in Turkish Lira or Venezuelan Bolivar. Not an issue for those in west, but not everyone has access to stable currency/markets.

> to ask currency to both act as transaction and store of value (those are opposite requirements).

They are actually complimentary, with one use-case following the other. For anything to be become tradable (used as currency) it must first be valuable. Over time, money that hold their value better become the "better money", as its ability to hold value becomes self-evident, and everyone becomes willing to accept it. This is how we got to a gold standard over some thousands of years. Lesser valuable monies trade hands more frequently, and have higher velocity, not because they are preferred to be held, but because people view them as inferior stores of value. Ie. you hoard the gold coins, and daily trade with the silver and copper ones. The proliferation of trade denominated in silver or copper makes it appear that a society prefers silver or copper as their money, but this is a deceptive metric.

Paper dollars initially represented a redeemable voucher for gold in a vault. Trading paper gold was more convenient than custodying actual gold. However you expected the paper to be redeemable for gold, which is why this paper bill had value in the first place.

Fascinating to me, because you likely know that any such declarations are wastes of time and will be unproductive. But you want this because of what it signals...

How many "normies" know what an IP address is?

I'm confused about why anyone is comparing the security of a defi token swapping platform to that of a fiat savings account.

If you want an apple to apples comparison you should be comparing the security of a savings account to that of a cold wallet. Those are much more alike in their function.

I don't think we classify people who engage in cross network token swapping as "normies". That's like classifying algorithmic day traders as an "average joe investor".